Guide to mining LiteCoins from scratch! Both cgminer and GUIminer version

I know this post doesn’t directly relate to gaming but there’s a lot of questions going around and I though a decent guide would help.

I have used info from a couple of guides I have found useful around the interwebs. There’s plenty of info if you Google it but it’s so easy to get lost too.

I’ve decided to make a step by step guide, many people since the skyrocket of Bitcoins have decided to look at mining Litecoins as it’s something one can do on a regular home or gaming system.1. Firstly, DOWNLOAD and install the latest version of the LiteCoin wallet! Get it from the official site. Link –> www.litecoin.org

NB: AVOID online wallets,they can be hacked and are not really very trusted. I have had my wallet of Bitcoins hacked back in the day and trust me it blows.
Always keep your coins in your wallet, and make sure to backup your wallet as well!! Don’t be that guy we all saw on the news who threw out 7500 Bitcoins.

Have you grabbed the wallet? Installed it?
Sweet now run it, let it sync(it could take several hours to do the first sync, dont worry) and find your unique LiteCoin address in the Receive tab! It should look something like this:

Copy and paste your address somewhere, preferably with the copy address button! We are going to need this in a bit later.

Lets move to step 2!

2. You will need some descent GPUs to mine LiteCoins. You could mine with CPUs as well(don’t) but its highly NOT recommended.

The difficulty now is so big and your hashrate will be too low that you will end up burning electricity for nothing. While both AMD and NVIDIA cards can mine litecoins, I highly recommend AMD, since they mine faster. Beeg time.

For this guide I’ve used: http://wemineltc.com/
First of all, we visit the pools’ page and sign up. It should look similar to this:

After filling everything correctly,you should see a screen like this

Now login with the new credentials you just created, by filling your username/password.

After logging in, go to account details

There, you will need to request for an email code verification, in order to protect your account AND setup
your payout address(remember in Step1, we created our unique payment address!)! Put your PIN and ask for an email confirmation!

You should see this on the upper screen

After asking for the confirmation, go to your email you used for your registration. You should have an email there from WeMineLTC. open it.

Perfect! Now we have the code! Lets go back to the Account Details page and lets put our payment address now

If done correctly, you should see payment change was made successfully.

Now, go create our first worker. Go to My Account–> My workers

Set the password for your miner(doesnt have to be something difficult, 1234 will do just fine), leave the difficulty settings as is, and hit Update.

This will do you if you have one pc. In case you have more than one, you can create multiple workers, one for each PC, or you could point them all to the same worker, wont make any real difference. Usually people set one miner account per PC because it makes monitoring easier!

Lets move to the next step!

5. To actually mine LiteCoins, we need a mining software. At the moment, there are two that we could use. CGMiner and GUIminer. With simple words we could say GUIminer is cgminer with graphics, and cgminer is abit more”advanced” than GUIminer. More experienced users prefer cgminer while less experienced ones go for the GUIminer.

I will cover both, so you can make your own choice.

Before we proceed though, go to Getting Started–>New user info and you should see this screen with the pools’ current mining servers.

For our example, we will use the first one,

stratum+tcp://global.wemineltc.com:3334

You will find this in the getting started page !)

GUIminer version: First of all, be aware that GUIminer was originally developed to mine BITCOINS, and not LITECOINS.
What we will actually work with to mine litecoins is called GUIminer Alpha. Thats the one you need!
The original GUIminer CANNOT mine litecoins!
Ok, since we got that clear, lets start! Boom!

Locate guiminer.exe and run it. GUIminer will run, and will give you some fields to complete. In host, we put the server we chose WITHOUT HTTPS or tcp:// or port. So we will put global.wemineltc.com in Port we will put 3334, in username field we put our workers name(in our example, Tutorial.1) and the password we created for it( in our case, 1234). We make sure that the stratum box is ALWAYS on YES and we can select from some pre-defined settings for our GPUs!

In this case (illustration purpose only) , our miner has 2x GigaByte 7950 cards, so we selected that one, and it fills all the other fields like thread concurrency,worksize, vectors etc automatically.So we end up to something like this:

If you cannot see your card there listed, you can check the mining comparison wiki for litecoin and grab the settings for your cards here –> https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison
Thats it! Hit Start, wait few seconds and you should see in awhile GUIminer counting shares.

Congratulations, you are mining litecoins! Now you’r gonna be super rich… WOOOT! (maybe not but that’s the goal right)

CGMiner version : for the most experienced users, and the ones that want some more”flexibility” and stats, cgminer is the key! It may look abit more”complicated, but it really isnt that much when someone explains you what on Earth it is, and how to use it! So lets start!

First of all, cgminer developer, for his own reasons, decided to STOP support for LiteCoin mining, so the latest versions DO NOT support LTC mining. Thus, we will stick to 3.5 version.
Go here –> http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/3.5/ and get 3.5 version

Save to desktop, and extract.
Navigate in the folder, right click and create a new text document.

In the first two lines, paste those commands:setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
And after that, this:
cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://global.wemineltc.com:3334 -u Tutorial.1 -p 1234 –thread-concurrency 24000 –lookup-gap 0 –gpu-engine 1100 –gpu-memclock 1250 –gpu-powertune 20 -w 256 -I 19 -g 1
After you write that, click Save As–> from the save as type select All Files and name it My Miner.bat Reason we name it with a .bat extension, is to make it executable and run cgminer with the parameters we wrote. Actually what I did here, is we give cgminer the command to run, in scrypt mode(thats the one litecoin uses), to connect in the server we said we would
use(stratum+tcp://stratum2.wemineltc.com:3335) , following by some parameters, like our username (-u), our miners password (-p), the thread concurrency of our cards, the look-gap command, where we want the gpu engine to run, where its memory clock, if we want to use the powertune option and how much, the workload(w), the Intensity of the card(I) and the number of threads per gpu(g). Those are the best settings that worked for us, for our GigaByte 7950s. You should find your own settings, again from the awesome guide over the litecoin hardware comparison wiki here –> https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison !

Thats it! Double click the My Miner.bat and you are mining litecoins!

Happy mining guys and gals.

If you have any questions or even suggestions leave them in the comment section please.